From Cambridge he removed to the pretty suburb of Belmont, some five miles out of Boston, to a house built for him by Mr. Charles Fairchild, on that gentleman’s own estate. This house, called Red Top, from its red roof and the red timothy grass in the neighborhood, was described and pictured some years ago in _Harper’s Magazine_, in Mr. Lathrop’s article on Literary and Social Boston. As I recollect it, this was the most elaborate of his several abodes. There were carried out many of the luxurious decorative features so essential according to the modern ideal. He had a study done in white in the colonial taste, and a square entrance-hall with benches and fire-place; but I fancy, even here, he enjoyed most the wide view from his windows, and his walks in the hilly country. It was the eye of the imagination rather than of the body that with him most sought gratification. He lived on the hillside at Belmont four years. His moving away from there about coincides with the time of his giving up the editing of _The Atlantic_. He went abroad with his family, remained a year, and then returned to Boston. It will be seen that he has not shown much more than the usual American fixity of residence, and perhaps we need not despair of his finally coming to New York, to which many of his later interests would seem to call him. With his retirement from the burden of editing begins, as many think, a new and larger period in his literary work. I am not to touch upon his original theories of literary art, or to interpret the much talked-of _mot_ on Dickens and Thackeray. As to the latter, I know that so magnanimous and appreciative a nature as his could never have really intended to cast a slur upon exalted merit. He has an intense delight in human life, as it is lived, and not as represented by historians or antiquarians, or colored by conventional or academic tradition of any kind. He is still so young a man and so powerful a genius that it may well be a yet grander period is opening before him. For my own part, I never quite get over the liking for the “Robinson Crusoe” touch, the “once upon a time,” the poem, as it were, in the fiction I read, and I think shall continue to like best of his stories “The Undiscovered Country,” in which the feeling of romance--together with all the reality of life--most prevails. However this may be, I cannot always repress a certain impatience that there should be any who fail to see his extraordinary ability; it seems to me it can only be because there is some veil before their eyes, because they have not put themselves in the way of taking the right point of view. Whether we like it best of all fiction or not, where are we to find another who works with such power? Where, if we deny him the first place, zealously look up all his defects, and take issue with him on a dozen minor points, are we to find another so original and creative a writer?